One preliminary thought I had was to embed a user specified key in the published stub that the author would set a global to in the actual project.
Very little security in that on its own. As you're trying to protect this from unscrupulous developers, using an open global is not the best approach, as somebody who routinely works outside the bounds of ethics is likely to know that running your dxr or dcr as a miaw or ldm lets them use the message window to showGlobals(), among other things.
You'll want to obfuscate it a bit more. Using a global *object* instead of variable, and calling some unusual method name to verify the key would take it a step further.
Perhaps you could read some image data from a particular graphic member's image (like one of your buttons or something), and use that as your key. That, you could store in an object in the stub, and your project would check it against the image data from member("whatever"). Yes, it's easy to get media from a dxr, but the hacker would have to guess which image the key is taken from (after first guessing that there's an image involved). Add a little encryption to the equation, and you're making it pretty difficult to get around.
Check the dir-game-l archives - protecting scoring info is a major concern on that list, and is essentially the same problem you've got. Security has been beaten pretty hard on that list.
hth,
Kurt
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